The Servants of Twilight (36 page)
Joey went off to scout the rest of the aisle ahead.
To Charlie, Christine said, “You mentioned that something else happened last night . . .”
He hesitated. He put two jars of applesauce in the cart. Then, with a look of sympathy and concern, he said, “Your house was also torched.”
Instantly, without conscious intent, she began to catalogue what she had lost, the sentimental as well as the truly valuable things that this act of arson had stolen from her: all Joey’s baby pictures; the fifteen-thousand-dollar Oriental carpet in the living room, which was the first expensive thing she’d owned, her first gesture of self-indulgence after the years of self-denial her mother had demanded of her; photographs of Tony, her long-dead brother; her collection of Lalique crystal . . .
For an awful moment she almost burst into tears, but then Joey returned to say that the dairy case was at the end of this aisle and that he would like some cottage cheese to go with the pineapple rings. And Christine realized that losing the Oriental carpets, the paintings, and even the old photographs was of little importance as long as she still had Joey. He was the only thing in her life that was irreplaceable. No longer on the verge of tears, she told him to get the cottage cheese.
When Joey moved away again, Charlie said, “My house, too.”
For a moment she wasn’t sure she understood. “Burned?”
“To the ground,” he said.
“Oh my God.”
It was too much. Christine felt like a plague-carrier. She had brought disaster to everyone who was trying to help her.
“Grace is desperate, you see,” Charlie said excitedly. “She doesn’t know where we’ve gone, and she really thinks that Joey is the Antichrist, and she’s afraid she’s failed in her God-given mission. She’s furious and frightened, and she’s striking out blindly. The very fact that she’s done these things means we’re safe here. Better than that, it means she’s rapidly destroying herself. She’s gone too far. She’s stepped way, way over the line. The cops can’t help but connect those three torchings with the murders at your place last night and with the bomb at Miriam Rankin’s house in Laguna. This is now the biggest story in Orange County, maybe the biggest story in the whole state. She can’t go around blowing up houses, burning them down. She’s brought
war
to Orange County, for Christ’s sake, and no one’s going to tolerate that. The cops are going to come down hard on her now. They’re going to be grilling her and everyone in her church. They’ll go over her affairs with a microscope. She’ll have made a mistake last night; she’ll have left incriminating evidence. Somewhere. Somehow. One little mistake is all the cops need. They’ll seize on it and pull her alibi apart. She’s done for. It’s only a matter of time. All we’ve got to do is lie low here for a few days, stay in the motel, and wait for the Church of the Twilight to fall apart.”
war
to Orange County, for Christ’s sake, and no one’s going to tolerate that. The cops are going to come down hard on her now. They’re going to be grilling her and everyone in her church. They’ll go over her affairs with a microscope. She’ll have made a mistake last night; she’ll have left incriminating evidence. Somewhere. Somehow. One little mistake is all the cops need. They’ll seize on it and pull her alibi apart. She’s done for. It’s only a matter of time. All we’ve got to do is lie low here for a few days, stay in the motel, and wait for the Church of the Twilight to fall apart.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said, but she wasn’t going to get her hopes up. Not again.
Joey returned with the cottage cheese and stayed close to them for a while, until they entered an aisle that contained a small toy section, where he drifted away to look at the plastic guns.
Charlie said, “We’ll finish shopping, get a bunch of magazines, a deck of cards, a few games, whatever we need to keep us occupied for the rest of the week. After we’ve taken everything back to the room, I’ll get rid of the car—”
“But I thought it wouldn’t turn up on any hot sheets for a few days yet. That’s what you said.”
He was trying not to look grim, but he couldn’t keep the worry out of either his face or his voice. He took a package of Oreos from the cookie section and put them in the cart. “Yeah, well, according to Henry, the cops have already found the yellow Cadillac we abandoned in Ventura, and they’ve already linked it with the stolen LTD and the missing plates. They lifted fingerprints from the Caddy, and because my prints are on file with my PI license application, they made a quick connection.”
“But from what you said, I didn’t think they ever worked that fast.”
“Ordinarily, no. But we had a piece of bad luck.”
“Another one?”
“That Cadillac belongs to a state senator. The police didn’t treat this like they would an ordinary stolen car report.”
“Are we jinxed or what?”
“Just a bit of bad luck,” he said, but he was clearly unnerved by this development.
Across the aisle from the cookies were potato chips, corn chips, and other snack foods, just the stuff she tried to keep Joey away from. But now she put potato chips, cheese puffs, and Fritos in the cart. She did it partly because she wanted to cheer Joey up—but also because it seemed foolish to deny themselves anything when the time left to them might be very short.
“So now the cops aren’t just looking for the LTD,” she said. “They’re looking for you, too.”
“There’s worse,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
She stared at him, not sure she wanted to hear what he had to tell her. During the last couple of days, she’d had the feeling they were all caught in a vise. For the past few hours, the jaws of the vise had loosened a bit, but now Grace Spivey was turning the handle tight again.
He said, “They found my Mercedes in the garage in Westwood. A phone tip sent them to it. In the trunk . . . they found a dead body.”
Stunned, Christine said, “Who?”
“They don’t know yet. A man. In his thirties. No identification. He’d been shot twice.”
“Spivey’s people killed him and put him in your car?” she asked, keeping an eye on Joey as he checked out the toy guns at the end of the aisle.
“Yeah. That’s what I figure. Maybe he was in the garage when they attacked us. Maybe he saw too much and had to be eliminated, and they realized they could use his body to put the police on my tail. Now Grace doesn’t have just her thousand or two thousand followers out looking for us; she’s got every cop in the state helping with the search.”
They were at a standstill now, speaking softly but intently, no longer pretending to be interested only in groceries.
“But surely the police don’t think
you
killed him.”
you
killed him.”
“They have to assume I’m involved somehow.”
“But won’t they realize it’s related to the church, to that crazy woman—”
“Sure. But they might think the guy in my trunk is one of her people and that I’ve eliminated him. Or even if they do suspect I’m being framed, they’ve still got to talk to me. They’ve still got to put a warrant out for me.”
The whole world was after them now. It seemed hopeless. Like a toxic chemical, despair settled into her bones, leeching her strength. She just wanted to lie down, close her eyes, and sleep for a while.
Charlie said, “Come on. Let’s get the shopping done, take everything back to the motel, and then dump the car. I want to hole up inside before some cop spots our license plates or recognizes me.”
“Do you think the police know we headed for Santa Barbara after we left Ventura?”
“They can’t know for sure. But they’ve got to figure we were running from L.A., moving north, so Santa Barbara’s a good bet.”
As they went up and down the remaining aisles, as they checked out and paid for the groceries, Christine found it difficult to breathe. She felt as if a spotlight were trained on them. She kept waiting for sirens and alarms.
Joey became even more lethargic and solemn than before. He sensed that they were hiding something from him, and maybe it wasn’t good to withhold the truth, but she decided it would be worse to tell him that the witch had burned down their house. That would convince him they were never going back, never going home again, which might be more than he could handle.
It was almost more than
she
could handle.
she
could handle.
Because maybe it was the truth. Maybe they’d never be able to go home again.
44
Charlie drove the
LTD into the motel lot, parked in the slot in front of their unit—and saw movement at the small window in the kitchenette. It might have been his imagination, of course. Or it might have been the maid. He didn’t think it was either.
LTD into the motel lot, parked in the slot in front of their unit—and saw movement at the small window in the kitchenette. It might have been his imagination, of course. Or it might have been the maid. He didn’t think it was either.
Instead of switching the engine off, he immediately threw the LTD into reverse and began backing out of the parking space.
Christine said, “What’s wrong?”
“Company,” he said.
“What? Where?”
In the rear seat, in a voice that was the essence of terror, Joey said, “The witch.”
In front of them, as they backed away from it, the door to their unit began to open.
How the hell did they find us so soon?
Charlie wondered.
Charlie wondered.
Not wanting to waste the time required to turn the car around, he kept it in reverse and backed rapidly toward the avenue in front of the motel.
Out in the street, a white van appeared and swung to the curb, blocking the exit from the Wile-Away Lodge.
Charlie saw it in the rearview mirror, jammed on the brakes to avoid hitting it.
He heard gunfire. Two men with automatic weapons had come out of the motel room.
“Get down!”
Christine looked back at Joey. “Get on the floor!” she told him.
“You too,” Charlie said, tramping on the accelerator again, pulling on the steering wheel, angling away from the van behind them.
She popped her seatbelt and crouched down, keeping her head below the windows.
If a bullet came through the door, she’d be killed anyway. There wasn’t anything Charlie could do about that. Except get the hell out of there.
Chewbacca barked, an ear-rupturing sound in the closed car.
Charlie reversed across the lot, nearly sideswiping a Toyota, clipping one corner of the wrought-iron fence that encircled the swimming pool. There was no other exit to the street, but he didn’t care. He’d make an exit of his own. He drove backward, over the sidewalk and over the curb. The undercarriage scraped, and Charlie prayed the fuel tank hadn’t been torn open, and the LTD slammed to the pavement with a jolt. The engine didn’t cut out.
Thank God
. His heart pounding as fast as the sedan’s six cylinders, Charlie kept his foot on the accelerator, roaring backward into State Street, tires screaming and smoking, nearly hitting a VW that was coming up the hill, causing half a dozen other vehicles to brake and wheel frantically out of his path.
Thank God
. His heart pounding as fast as the sedan’s six cylinders, Charlie kept his foot on the accelerator, roaring backward into State Street, tires screaming and smoking, nearly hitting a VW that was coming up the hill, causing half a dozen other vehicles to brake and wheel frantically out of his path.
The white Ford van pulled away from the motel exit, which it had been blocking, drove into the street again, and tried to ram them. The truck’s grille looked like a big grinning mouth, a shark’s maw, as it bore down on them. Two men were visible beyond the windshield. The van clipped the right front fender of the LTD, and there was a tortured cry of shredding metal, a shattering of glass as the car’s right headlight was pulverized. The LTD rocked from the blow, and Joey cried out, and the dog bleated, and Charlie almost bit his tongue.
Christine started to rise to see what was happening, and Charlie shouted at her to stay down as he shifted gears and drove forward, east on State, swinging wide around the back of the white van. It tried to ram him in reverse, but he got past it in time.
He expected the crumpled fender to obstruct the tire and eventually bring them to a stop, but it didn’t. There were a few clanging-tinkling sounds as broken pieces of the car fell away, but there was no grinding noise of the sort that an impacted tire or an obstructed axle would make.
He heard more gunfire. Bullets thudded into the car, but none of them entered the passenger compartment. Then the LTD was moving fast, pulling out of range.
Charlie was grinding his teeth so hard that his jaws hurt, but he couldn’t stop.
Ahead, at the corner, on the cross-street, another white Ford van appeared on their right, swiftly moving out from the shadows beneath a huge oak.
Jesus, they’re everywhere!
The new van streaked toward the intersection, intent on blocking Charlie. To stay out of its way, he pulled recklessly into oncoming traffic. A Mustang swung wide of the LTD, and behind the Mustang a red Jaguar jumped the curb and bounced into the parking lot of a Burger King to avoid a collision.
The LTD had reached the intersection. The car was responding too sluggishly, though Charlie pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor.
From the right, the second van was still coming. It couldn’t block him now; it was too late for that, so it was going to try to ram him instead.
Charlie was still in the wrong lane. The driver of an oncoming Pontiac braked too suddenly, and his car went into a slide. It turned sideways, came straight at them, a juggernaut.
Charlie eased up on the accelerator but didn’t hit the brakes because he would lose his flexibility if he stopped completely and would only be delaying the moment of impact.
In a fraction of a second, he considered all his options. He couldn’t swing left into the cross-street because it was crowded with traffic. He couldn’t go right because the car was bearing down on him from that direction. He couldn’t throw the car into reverse because there was lots of traffic behind him, and, besides, there was no time to shift gears and back up. He could only go forward as the Pontiac slid toward him, go forward and try to dodge the hurtling mass of steel that suddenly loomed as large as a mountain.
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